“We will maintain our revenue, the same or better” than
third-quarter sales of $51 million for Spectrum, the maker of
the cancer drug Fusilev, Shrotriya said today in a telephone
interview.

Spectrum, of Irvine, California, declined 6.3 percent to
$14.05 at the close in New York, the biggest single-day drop
since Oct. 3. “Rumor and perception” that the company’s
fourth-quarter revenue will fall short of third-quarter sales
may have caused the decline, Shrotriya said.

The company’s stock has had a “tremendous run” in the
past year, and “we’re not hearing anything that would have us
worry that it’s being derailed,” Reni Benjamin, an analyst with
Rodman & Renshaw in New York, said today by telephone. The
shares had more than doubled in the year before today.

“Every which way we look at it, we think the momentum is
right and that the fundamentals for the company remain strong,”
Benjamin said. “That being said, we’re not too surprised that
investors would take some profits at some point.”

Spectrum’s fourth-quarter revenue may rise 2.4 percent to
$52.2 million, said Joseph Pantginis, an analyst at Roth Capital
Partners in New York.

Risk to Fusilev

While demand for the company’s colon-cancer drug Fusilev
will probably remain strong for at least the first half of 2012,
“the risk has always been prominent” for Spectrum that a
shortage of a competing generic drug called leucovorin will end
and lead to a decline in sales, Pantginis said in an interview.

Fusilev, an injection known chemically as levoleucovorin,
first won FDA approval in 2008 for patients with a bone tumor
called osteosarcoma. The agency cleared the drug for wider use
in April for patients with advanced colon cancer.

The FDA had earlier taken steps to make Fusilev available
to colon-cancer patients amid the shortage of leucovorin, the
drug that had been the standard treatment. Fusilev is a purer
compound than leucovorin, so it’s effective at half the dosage,
according to Spectrum’s Fusilev website.

A shortage of paclitaxel, another generic cancer drug,
ended last year, cutting into fourth-quarter sales for Celgene
Corp.’s Abraxane, Celgene said today on an earnings call.

That may have led some investors to speculate that the
leucovorin shortage may also end soon and cause a similar
decline in Spectrum’s Fusilev sales, Pantginis said.

“Even though I consider it to be foolhardy to draw a
correlation, there might be some investors out there who might
make the leap that says if the paclitaxel shortage is ending,
maybe we need to be concerned with the leucovorin shortage
ending,” he said.

Spectrum doesn’t expect Fusilev sales to decline if the
leucovorin shortage ends, because Fusilev is a “better drug,”
Shrotriya said.